Chapter 56: Between the Mountains
The path was shoulder-wide, which was exactly as wide as it needed to be to keep you from falling in, and not an inch more.
On her left, rock wall: close enough to touch, which she did, one hand trailing against the stone as she moved. On her right: nothing, which was to say the gorge, which was to say a darkness so complete that looking into it produced the same sensation as looking into something alive. The torch she carried threw its light forward and slightly left, turning the wall beside her into amber and shadow, and lit nothing at all of the space to her right.
She kept her eyes ahead.
This was the only way through the Impassable Mountains during the Months of the Demons. She knew this because she had tried the alternatives — the high passes, which became impassable in fact and not just in name by late autumn; the lower routes, which wound through valleys where demonic beasts gathered in numbers that made passage suicidal alone. The gorge was dangerous in a different way, a way she could manage. The cold was survivable down here; there was geothermal warmth rising from somewhere deep below, turning the air at the bottom from killing-cold to merely uncomfortable, and occasionally when the gorge widened she could see wisps of it rising — grey breath, ghost-breath, the mountain breathing out. The snowfall that blanketed the passes couldn’t reach this depth. The demonic beasts that roamed the surface couldn’t navigate the path.
There was something down here, though. She didn’t know what it was. She had walked this gorge four times in three years and every time there was this — a quality of attention that had no source she could identify, a sense of being assessed from multiple directions by something that was not moving. Her torch’s light reached the far wall intermittently where the gorge narrowed, and on that far wall there were holes: cave entrances, more than she could count, most of them perfectly dark, some of them exuding the slight warmer air that meant they went deep into the stone. They were the right size for something large to fit through.
Don’t think about the caves, she told herself, for the fourth time since she’d entered the gorge.
She thought about Border Town instead.
She thought about Anna, who had passed through her day of adulthood without pain. Who had been unconscious through it, which should by every law Nightingale understood about the Demon’s Bite have been a death sentence, and who had woken up the next morning and made green fire dance on her palm. The color it had been — not fire-orange, not the yellow-white of an ordinary flame, but that particular green, the color of deep glass, of something seen through still water.
Roland Wimbledon had put his finger into it.
She had watched him do it. Watched him hesitate for exactly the right amount of time — long enough to acknowledge that this required thought, not so long as to make Anna wait — and then extend one finger into the flame as though it were a perfectly ordinary thing, a thing he had already decided about in some prior calculation that he hadn’t bothered to announce.
She was still not entirely sure what to make of Roland Wimbledon. He was not what she had expected. She had expected a provincial noble, which usually meant a man who had inherited certainties about his position in the world and resented anything that complicated them. What she had found was something more like—she searched for the word—a builder. A man who looked at things and thought about what they could become, including people, including witches, which was a category of person that very few builders had ever thought about at all except as material to be feared and discarded.
He wasn’t sentimental about it, either. That was important. Sentiment was unreliable. Sentiment could reverse itself the moment something became inconvenient, the moment someone important applied pressure, the moment a witch did something that frightened someone who mattered. What Roland had was something harder and less romantic than sentiment. Something that she had provisionally decided to call principles, though she would not say that word out loud, because it was the kind of word that invited disappointment.
Ahead, the path split.
Left and slightly upward. Right and down, into a darkness without bottom.
She stopped at the bifurcation and stood still for a moment that she allowed herself. The sensation of being watched had intensified here, at the junction, as though whatever lived in the caves had been following her progress and was most attentive at decision points. Her mouth was dry. She gritted her teeth against it, reached for her ability, and slipped sideways into the world of fog.
The cold disappeared. The sense of being watched disappeared. The gorge remained, visible in its architecture but drained of the quality that had been making her skin crawl for the past two hours. She moved upward and left, keeping her steps quiet by long habit, and after another quarter of an hour the walls fell away and opened into the wider space at the top, and through a low entrance ahead of her there was firelight.
She let her ability go and stepped into the warmth.
The witch on watch duty was a young woman she’d worked with before — small, with a habit of having her hands in motion when she wasn’t actively doing something, which made her easy to spot at distance. She recognized Nightingale and lowered the black smog wall she’d raised in two seconds flat.
“You’re back!”
“I’m back.” Nightingale looked at the two bands tied around the young witch’s left arm, and her relief at arriving somewhere warm and known tilted sideways into something colder.
“Two more sisters,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
The young witch’s hands stilled. “Airy and Abby. Five days ago. Their day of adulthood came together — they shared a birthday, you know how twins—” She stopped. Started again. “Wendy is inside. She’s asking after you.”
Airy and Abby. A pair of twins who’d left a comfortable family in Fallen Dragon Mountain because the alternative was discovery and the Church and a fire in a public square. They had laughed constantly and easily, the way people do who have not yet run out of things to laugh about. They had been seventeen.
Nightingale moved through the cave toward the firelight.
Wendy was crouching near the central fire working on something involving a pot and two different herbs, which was a typical position for her. She was thirty years old and looked twenty-five, which was one of the small gifts that being a witch sometimes gave, the appearance lagging behind the calendar, and her red-brown hair was down and half-lit by the fire. When she heard footsteps she turned around without hurrying, the way people who are very secure in themselves turn around.
“Veronica,” she said. “Welcome home.”
“I’ve told you — I’m not that girl anymore.” But she said it the way she always said it, not with heat, and Wendy’s smile did not change.
“You’re still you,” Wendy said. “What you’ve walked away from doesn’t have to take everything that came before it.” She set down her spoon. “Come here.”
Nightingale crossed the cave and hugged her, and for a moment just stood there with her face against her sister’s shoulder and did not say anything.
“You look like you walked through a mountain,” Wendy said.
“I did walk through a mountain.”
“And the girl? Were you in time?”
Nightingale pulled back. She looked at Wendy’s face — the concern there, the steady warmth of her attention that had always made Nightingale think of banked coals rather than open fire — and felt the news she’d been carrying for three days rise up in her chest like something that needed to get out.
“She didn’t need saving,” she said. “Wendy — Anna went through her day of adulthood without pain. She was unconscious for it and it didn’t kill her. She woke up and she—” She stopped, because there was an ordering to this information that mattered. “I need to tell everyone. All of them. Can you gather them?”
Wendy looked at her for a long moment.
“Tell me first,” she said quietly.
So Nightingale sat down by the fire and told her — about Border Town, about Roland Wimbledon, about the workshop and the wall and the night of the Bite and the green fire and the bowing soldiers. About the theory Roland had explained to her in the careful, impersonal way he explained most things: that the Bite was pressure, and the pressure could be relieved, and that regular use of a witch’s ability during the year might reduce or eliminate what they had always been told was divine punishment and was possibly instead just physics.
She watched Wendy’s face while she talked. The concern that had been there became something else — something that moved through several stages she could not name, settling finally into a stillness that was not the same as calm.
“He said all of us,” Wendy said. “He would take all of us.”
“He said he hoped we would come.” Nightingale looked at the fire. “He didn’t promise paradise. He promised work, and safety while we worked, and that one day—” She found herself using his exact words, because they had stayed with her, unadorned the way he’d said them: “One day, witches in his territory would live the same life as anyone else.”
The fire moved. Somewhere deeper in the cave, she could hear voices — her sisters, living the particular life of people who have given up on most futures and are carefully not thinking about that.
“We’d have to cross the mountains again,” Wendy said.
“In spring. The passes are clear in spring.”
Wendy was quiet for a while. Then she reached out and put her hand over Nightingale’s, and Nightingale turned her hand over without thinking and held on.
“Tell me again,” Wendy said. “About the night she woke up. The green fire.”
Nightingale told her again. She told it without shortcutting anything, watching Wendy’s face, and when she got to the part where Roland had extended his finger into the flame and the flame had not burned him, she saw something move in Wendy’s expression — not wonder, not yet, but the first cautious loosening of the face a person makes when they are deciding whether to believe something they very much want to believe.
Wendy was quiet for a long moment after she finished.
“He said all of this,” she said at last. “In those words.”
It was not quite a question.